The Circulation of Worthless Tokens Aids Cooperation: An Experiment Inspired by the Kula

Giuseppe Danese and Luigi Mittone
Additional contact information
Giuseppe Danese: Philosophy Politics and Economics, University of Pennsylvania, 313 Claudia Cohen Hall, 249 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA

Games, 2018, vol. 9, issue 3, 1-20

Abstract: Many anthropological records exist of seemingly worthless tokens exchanged in traditional societies. The most famous instances of such tokens are probably the Kula necklaces and armbands first described by B. Malinowski. In our experiment, each participant can send a token to another participant before each round of a repeated public good game. We use as examples of tokens a bracelet built by the participants in the lab, a simple piece of cardboard provided by the experimenter, and an object brought from home by the participants. Notwithstanding the cheap-talk nature of the decision to send the token, both sending and receiving the token are associated with a significant increase in contributions to the public good. Regression analysis shows that contributions to the public good in the treatments featuring a bracelet and a cardboard piece are higher than in a control study. The home object appears not to have been equally useful in increasing contributions.

Keywords: Kula; worthless tokens; cooperation; public goods games; signaling; kitoum (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C C7 C70 C71 C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/9/3/63/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/9/3/63/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jgames:v:9:y:2018:i:3:p:63-:d:167324

Access Statistics for this article

Games is currently edited by Ms. Susie Huang

More articles in Games from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().